A Thought Experiment

In the following section, I will explore a conceivable thesis on the nature of the trinity to assess its implications.

The structure of immanent and proximate is not so much something fundamental to the deity as it is something fundamental to me. Every thought, desire, and perception which I have has as its most fundamental characteristic an overwhelming but unsubstantiated obsession with some supposed object, with the result that the most fundamental characteristic of my experience as a sentient being has become this incessant orienting towards the external. These two elements are defined by the very nature of thinking: the thought itself, and the thing about which I think, to which I have no access apart from the thought. I do not know that the thing itself exists, but I do know that if the thing itself does not exist, then I am such a thing as by inescapable compulsion concerns himself with spooks, and if that is so, I count it no loss. Whether or not incarnation is the fundamental nature of God when he is viewed from another reference frame is unknowable from this one. So when I say that God is incarnation, it might be reasonable to say that I am not really talking about the innermost nature of God at all. I am talking about God’s relationship to man: God, as viewed by man, is incarnation. God appears to man as incarnation. When a person looks at a certain object, he sees that it is red. The question of color, once projected onto the object, will always produce the answer red, because the question has real interaction with the object. But the category itself was never a part of the object independently of human observers. Its redness cannot therefore be said to be an intrinsic attribute of the thing itself; only its unique, inaccessible nature can be described in this way. Its redness is its relationship to human minds. Likewise, the distinction between the incomprehensible and the superficial which is necessary to construct a word like Immanuel is a direct projection of the central categorization implied by human perception onto God himself. It is the meeting of the form of comprehension proceeding from our innermost nature with the fundamental nature of God, the one question which we ask of everything, at all times, without fail, “are you the thing being thought about, or the thought itself?” In God alone, we are met with the answer: “yes.” The name is God the thing thought about, and the word is God the thought- and so the trinity arises from the essence-energies distinction, and this from the most fundamental aspect of human comprehension. The trinity is real as the redness of an object is real, but it is an answer to a question formed by humanity and is not God’s innermost nature, which is unknowable.

This argument does have its strengths, but it does not and cannot sufficiently address the incomprehensibility of the trinity itself. Nonetheless, I have learned a good deal from this endeavor.

Edit: by the way, the theory under examination was a form of modified sabbelianism, which I reject. My actual position is chalcedonianism.

• christianity
• philosophy